Meh. It was fun in a different way, but man, trying to get even basic things working was a pain. The tooling sucked, documentation was terrible, community was w

Meh. It was fun in a different way, but man, trying to get even basic things working was a pain. The tooling sucked, documentation was terrible, community was whatever happened to be physically nearby (or a local BBS if you had a modem), compiling took hours (10 hours to compile a BSD kernel on a 68030), you needed specialized, expensive equipment for so many things, compatibility sucked, storage was expensive, UX wasn't a thing so user interfaces were crappy or sometimes downright unusable, "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand" neckbeards... It wasn't until the mid-90s that things started to suck less. But a lot of people remember the hacker days of the 70s and 80s with rose tinted glasses (probably with a little help from that Halt and Catch Fire TV show). Different, not better. The stuff you can do today is astounding, and for cheap. Languages are plentiful and powerful. Help is almost guaranteed on anything. Open source everywhere. Open protocols everywhere. Open collaboration everywhere. AI does your grunt work. Run-anywhere is a real thing. If anything, I'd be tempted to call NOW the golden age...